Rather than poising his entrepreneurial efforts as a single company offering a suite of products, InCube Labs CEO Mir Imran believes in segmenting each product into its own stand-alone venture. His reasoning? Cleaner R&D, a more potent investor magnet, and greater product development and marketing focus.

Transcript



Why do you set them up as individual companies as opposed to having one big company with all of these different product lines? One of the reasons startups are successful is because you have a single-minded focus on one problem. So if you have four problems or five problems under one roof with an R&D team, first of all, you cannot attract investors. They're attracted to a specific problem. Secondly, you can't focus. One project can steal all the resources if it's going well, or one project that's not going well can drag the whole thing down. So it's better to separate them early. I only allow myself to be distracted and unfocused. So you're the one who gets to be distracted and unfocused but all the teams are very focused on their project.

1. Problem Analysis at the Cellular Level
2. Exit Strategy for the Single Product Company
3. Single Product, Single Focus
4. Implementing Ideas into Practice
5. When to Kill A Business
6. The Challenge of Staffing the Team
7. Get the Business Basics
8. Market Size Determines Company Size

Mir Imran from InCube Labs lectures on Entrepreneurship for Stanford University students, February 20, 2008. Mir Imran founded InCube Laboratories in 1995 to focus on his passion: creating medical device solutions that change the standard of care in critical healthcare markets. Mir began his career as a med-tech entrepreneur in the late 1970's. Over the decades, he has become one of the world's most successful inventors, entrepreneurs and investors in healthcare. In this Stanford lecture, he talks about problem analysis at the cellular level, when to kill a business and the challenge of staffing the team.

Course Details:
- Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture
- Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner (ecorner)

Original Course Name: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture